Focused on playing EVE the wrong way

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Monthly Archives: September 2011

Rather quickly after Incarna was released, enterprising players had worked out how to get your own videos to be displayed on the Captain Quarters main screen. Trigger pony and unicorn screen captures – amongst other things. In reality, CCP should have foreseen that and had protections and checksums in place.

Their response – which took a little while, was in my mind a common sense one. They made the process easier and explained how everyone could do it:

I made around 25M last week from empire PI and minimal trade. For around an hours effort, maybe a bit more, that is reasonable. I just need to ensure I spend that hour each week.

Training continues in game. My main is 2 weeks off Logistics V, Alt 1 is 11 days off Minmatar Cruiser V, and Alt 3 is less than a day away from being able to use T2 Medium Artillery, to add to the Autocannon skill he picked up the other day. They are at 85M, 78M and 8M SP respectively. Alt 2 has 14M SP, and Alt 4 is a smidge under 2M.

I remember when I first started out in the game it seemed to take an age for your Skill points to amass to something worthwhile. It was a goal within the game to reach each milestone – and you guessed you might be a capable pilot when you hit 10M, then it was 20M, then 30M, then 50M, then 75M… and now I am thinking, maybe when I hit 100M I might get to the point when I really know what I am doing…

I have never really made much of an effort to do ratting in 0.0. During my last stint in Null Sec I would have been lucky to rat an hour or two a month. I’ve decided that I would make more of the opportunity this time round, if only just to keep the ISK ticking over.

I had meant to spend some time on Saturday getting used to the process, but instead ended up flying a Freighter around empire on one of my alts to help a Corp mate out. (Moving supplies that he couldn’t, due to the current War Dec.) I tried again on Sunday, but the effort was short lived.

The only PVE ship I moved down to 0.0 was an Ishtar. While a practical, high tank, high DPS option, I very quickly remembered that I don’t actually like having to micro manage drones when busy watching my alignment, local and the Intel channels. You really want your ratting process to be as simple as possible.

So then I spent the next 90 minutes trying to piece together an alternative ship and appropriate fittings, based on what was available on the market. I ended up with an active shield tanked Cyclone. I still have to pick up some rigs and ammo before I can take it out and give it a test though. Those might require a little time and patience to grab due to their location.

I was also reminded quickly that if you loot your wrecks, you very quickly run out of cargo space. I anchored a Giant Secure Container at a safe to ease that issue.

I plan on trying to optimise the process. I usually over tank my ships – so this time I am actually looking to maximise damage, and use only the barest tank required. I just need to balance it out.

I’m not sure if this says nothing, or says a lot. It is acknowledgement that CCP is now concentrating on delivering to the players what they want. You would think that was simple enough – but there has been a feeling for a while now that CCP was not focusing on the game. The ship spinning, EVE fonts, etc would suggest that maybe this return of focus is true.

Why make this blog however? I guess CCP noticed the recent suggestions that some big news was expected, and this was to say we just have to wait a little longer for details.

Basically it is a repeat of what was covered at (if I remember correctly) the fanfest, which is that they are looking at a formal way of rewarding players who identify and inform CCP of security issues within the game. I wonder if this was the contentious blog? In a practical sense, it is not something which will be used by the vast majority of the players, so I hope CCP don’t spend an inordinate amount of time polishing the concept off. I have no problem with the idea – although in real life apparently the rewards offered up to help solve crimes are almost never actually paid out.

The New Alliance has had a War Declaration – its first it would seem. It is from the same Corporation which was at war with our last Alliance when it (unrelated) closed up shop. It is a bit unfortunate that we probably brought the unwanted attention across with us. I assume they either thought we ran, and so wanted to grief us for doing so, or (just as likely) they got a spy in the corporation during its recent expansion, and want to make use of it.

I’m sitting in 0.0 at the moment, where I had planned to focus my time for the next few weeks, so the war will again unlikely have any impact on me. (Unless of course I decided to go looking for them in Empire.)

This time they are updating the main font used in EVE. I am very happy to see this overdue change. Maybe I am just getting old, but it can be a struggle to work out system and character names with too many characters (such and I & 1, and O & 0) looking the same.

Keep these sorts of changes coming please CCP.

We can apparently expect some more blogs in the near future, although apparently the CSM – while happy, suggest there might be some controversy. That’s got me interested.

Meanwhile in game, I parked an Orca at the local trading hub, and spent a lazy 500M ISK on ammunition and spare parts. I literally started at the top of the market tree, and went down every pathway related to ship fittings, buying up anything I thought might be useful to have in 0.0 for quick fitting changes. 4 full Giant Secure Containers later, I moved everything to my low sec jump system, and got it safely down to 0.0. I now have some 25 ships and 17,000m3 of supplies moved down there. Next I have to start losing them…

There is certainly a different feeling with having assets in NPC 0.0 verses Sovereign 0.0. Basically it is a lot less concerning. You can’t be locked out of the station (ignoring short term camps), you don’t risk the assets becoming trapped, and the market is far better if you move and want to sell some stuff off.

So spinning ships will hopefully hit the test server “soon”. The screen images and description in the blog suggest it will closely mimic the old functionality, which I had not fully expected. I am surprisingly pleased with this.

CCP will also be reverting the generated turret model icons back to the original custom drawn icons. That will make things far more useable in game.

Some bits on Captain quarters I ignored.

Last of all they have a new Cyno effect which should be out on the test server within the week.

In reality it is not so much moving forward, but instead is just regaining lost functionality, but I am still looking forward to the above getting back on the EVE cluster.

The Alliance the corporation was in for the last month is closing down. It appears the leadership was frustrated at the lack of people joining up for PVP ops. While they needed some help with how to lead and motivate people, their main problem was that the majority of their membership was in clearly stated industrialist corporations. I would have thought the results of that would have been kind of obvious.

Anyway – the Corporation leadership must be doing a reasonable job with their diplomacy, because we are moving with a minimum of fuss into another Alliance in the area. Basically our Corporation is a relaxed environment with no CTAs or pressing demands on its players. It aims to provide its membership with access to as many facets of the game as possible – hence its 0.0 presence. (Plus all sorts of other projects and operations that you can join if you wish.) The players in the area are there because they want to be. They join on the ops because they want to. It is an approach which isn’t always respected. I hope the new Alliance don’t have any other expectations, and are a better fit.

There is also a War Dec active, but that personally isn’t likely to be much of a factor.

My main finished off all his current Capital skills to rank III, and just started off on Logistics V.

Alt 1 will be shortly finishing off Drone Sharpshooting V, before working on Launcher Rigging IV. I am running out of suitable skills to get to rank V for him. I might get his PI skills up next. It is also probably time to start him training on other racial ships and guns.

Alt 2 will finish off her Orca skill plan in 12 hours. She isn’t a brilliant Orca pilot, but workable for hauling and reasonable boosting. At least she can just hop into the current fit of my main and Alt1 without me needing to swap anything. When she is done I will swap the training over to Alt 3, who will focus on Mission running and PVP skills for a while.

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